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A done deal

• Mark Mardell
• 19 Oct 07, 06:55 AM

The champagne glasses were raised and chinked with a flourish as Gordon Brown said to the Portuguese prime minister, "Well done, you’ve done brilliantly. We’re very proud of you."

At 12 minutes past one in the morning, a delighted, smiling Jose Socrates declared that the Treaty of Lisbon would be signed on 13 December.

He declared it a victory for Europe that would take the EU out of a blind alley so that it could play its full role in the world. The commission president, himself a former Portuguese PM, Jose Manuel Barroso, declared himself absolutely delighted and said it was a historic agreement.

So the European Reform Treaty is a done deal. How Gordon Brown coped with the boredom, as others discussed details that were of not of the slightest interest to him, I don’t yet know.

The Bulgarians got the right to write the word "euro" in Cyrillic script.

The Italians have won an extra MEP.

And the Poles, on the brink of a general election, have a complex formula to delay legislation written into a legally binding protocol.

A last-minute hitch cropped up about the date the High Representative for foreign affairs would be appointed. That too was sorted out, so that the European Parliament has a say in the matter.

It's clear that the leaders, including Mr Brown, have an agreed line: the navel-gazing about institutions is over, it's time to move on to things that matter to most people in Europe, like climate change and the economy.

Referendum campaign

But will Mr Brown be allowed to move on?

Moments after the agreement, the shadow Europe Minister Mark Francois said: "In the small hours of the night, Gordon Brown has agreed the revised EU constitution which potentially transfers massive powers from Britain to the EU. He had absolutely no democratic mandate to do this and we will now step up our campaign to secure the referendum which he promised the British people all along."

Mr Brown will face similar demands from UKIP, some trade unions and some Labour MPs, to allow British people a chance to vote on the treaty.

It's absolutely clear that he has no intention of doing so. I can’t quite see what would force him to change his mind.

Prime ministers are only forced into a referendum by massive internal splits or the need to remove a contentious issue from a general election. He's not having a general election for a while and although some Labour MPs want a referendum it doesn’t divide the party.

He calculates that while the Conservatives' charge that he doesn’t trust the people may do some short-term damage, it's unlikely to still be hurting him come the time for an election.

The Sun breathes fire in today’s editorial and threatens to keep up its campaign until the next general election. As it warns that Britain’s existence as an independent sovereign state has been extinguished, I presume it will abandon what it must believe has become the worthless charade of covering Westminster politics, and I look forward to welcoming its political staff as they are all shipped out to Brussels to report on the real action.

Scotland? Denmark?

While there are plenty of arguments - many expressed in replies to my postings here - why he SHOULD give a referendum, I've yet hear or read one convincing me that he WILL.

I suspect the prime minister's strategy is simple: head down, weather the storm. The issue will, however, surface again and again.

He’ll presumably give a statement to the House of Commons on Monday. Then he'll be back for a signing ceremony before Christmas. There are suggestions that the SNP might force a consultative referendum in Scotland, although I haven't yet checked this out. Some Lib Dem MPs might make it an issue in their leadership contest.

Early next year, the House of Commons will debate the treaty in detail and almost certainly vote on the demand for an election.

Pressure may build for a referendum in Denmark, and perhaps elsewhere. The Irish people will vote, and I have heard rumours British campaigners may help the "No" campaign there. But the odds are against such upsets.

I would never rule out a surprise. But by early summer Mr Brown can reasonably expect the treaty to be adopted in all 27 members of the European Union. After that he is probably out of the woods, unless there is some big and obvious European Union policy that allows campaigners to say, "We warned you."

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Unofficially, we have a deal

• Mark Mardell
• 19 Oct 07, 12:05 AM

It seems as if a deal has been done although that isn't official yet.

The Italians get an extra MEP, and the total number of MEPs is increased by one, so no-one else loses out.

The Poles get something like the protocol they wanted, spelling out that in exceptional cases member states can delay a plan, even if they don't have the full number of votes needed to stop it.

The leaders are now back in a final session to tie all this together.

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